Those of you familiar with automobile racing will immediately recognize the names of Roger Penske and Mark Donohue, an owner/designer and engineer/driver team that dominated automobile racing for a long time. Each time they would enter some new class of racing, they would immediately begin to be a threat to the old heads and would soon be winning everything in sight. On one occasion, Mark was being questioned by reporters as to the secret of his success. He replied that he had an unfair advantage, and let the question drop. For weeks this answer drove the reporters nuts as they tried to figure out just what this unfair advantage really entailed. When finally pressed further, Mark said this unfair advantage was, simply, attention to detail. Please keep that remark in mind as you read the remainder of this article.
Several F-16 accidents give all the indications that the pilot hit the ground in a perfectly good airplane. One reason advanced for some of these accidents was that the pilot was unconscious at the time.
Why was he unconscious? (A rhetorical question.) It appears that he had pulled more g than his body was capable of withstanding. How could this happen? Are you not a dyed-in-the-wool fighter pilot, ever capable of sustaining at least twelve g’s?
Can you really? Any time you want? Let's look a little deeper into the mechanics of functioning effectively (the operative words here) under the g loads the F-16 is capable of delivering.
How about your own pink body? What kind of physical condition are you in? Are you really? Do you take proper care of the carcass the genetic pool provided for you? Do you get the proper diet? Do you get the right amount of rest? Do you sometimes fly despite a partially debilitating illness? Worse yet, do you sometimes indulge in a little self-medication for the aforementioned illness? Do you take good care of the equipment issued you? Do you use all the equipment that is available? Do you drink a little too much? Hummmmmm?
If you're serious about flying high performance fighter aircraft, then you'd better get serious about just how you condition your own body. Consider the following:
- How much exercise do you get? The idea here is not to become a marathon runner or a triathlon competitor. In order to be really in shape for these events, your blood pressure would become too low to fly fighters effectively. But neither can you emulate a sloth, swilling beer in front of your TV set every evening and weekend. It's up to you to establish a routine that will provide a lot of walking, a moderate amount of running (especially up stairs), a reasonable amount of situps, and a general routine of weight work in order to be in the physical condition necessary to really use the airplane to its maximum.
- How much rest do you get? Do you really get a good night's sleep before you go fly? If your body is not rested and ready, then neither are you. I think it was Casey Stengel who, when asked by a sports reporter about his rules concerning sex before the big game replied, "Hell, it's not the sex that gets you. It's the staying up all night looking for it!" The moral of the story is this: If you're accustomed to getting six, seven, or eight hours sleep a night, then don't stay up to one or two in the morning and expect to be 100 percent four hours later when you strap yourself into your F-16.
- Do you eat right? Just like your jet, you need the right kind of fuel in order to fly. I'm not going to go into a nutrition course here. You all know what is contained in a balanced diet. Make sure you eat the right kinds of food before thrusting yourself into the high-g environment.
- Do you smoke? There's been a controversy lately about blood doping by some of our Olympic athletes. What they've been doing is extracting and saving some quantity of their own blood. Then, just before the big event, they infuse the additional blood into their system. The idea is to supercharge their blood system with an additional amount of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. This is certainly nothing that we could or even should try to do ourselves, but why go to the opposite extreme and tie up a large proportion of what red blood cells you have with useless CO? Don’t.
- Then there's the touchy subject of drinking. Fighter pilots are somewhat the victims of a macho, hard living, hard-drinking image that has existed since World War I. I'm not a teetotaler. I drink something besides diet soft drinks. But I don't drink more than one beer if I'm going to be flying the next day (especially if I'm going to be flying early the next day). We're nowhere near the limit of a human's ability to fly airplanes, but you're sure cutting into your margin if you insist on staying up late and trying to drink everybody under the table. You are not sober the next morning if you try to go fly. For that matter, you can sometimes find traces of alcohol in your system more than forty-eight hours later. A very insidious side effect is that alcohol in your system can infuse and partially replace the fluid normally contained in the inner ear, which can screw up your inner ear calibration and give you erroneous inputs under g, just when you can ill afford them.
Okay. Enough about your body. It's all yours, but it's up to you to take the proper care of it. Just don't forget that the high-g environment you're trying to exist in is more than the average citizen can tolerate. You must have the self-discipline not to fall prey to the wrong fighter pilot image. That should have changed about the time we quit flying P-51s and P-47s.
Now let's talk about your equipment. In what kind of shape is your g-suit? I know of two individuals who thought it wasn't macho to wear a g-suit. (One of them is a mort in an airplane while pulling a lot of g’s.) Make sure your suit is in good condition and is properly fitted; that is, snug if not downright tight. Do you always make sure you zip up the thigh zippers? I'll bet you sometimes forget. Do you always plug the sucker into the connection, properly or otherwise? (The new connectors will go a long way to ensure that the connection stays put once you've pressed them firmly together.) Make sure you have the g-suit refitted after it stretches (they all do). The new quick-fill valve now being installed in the airplane will help a lot.
I definitely get the impression that we're not all doing the right kind of M-1/L-1. Make sure you know just what it is that you're trying to accomplish with the maneuver. In its simplest terms, you're trying to artificially raise your blood pressure while pulling g. Over any period of time, it's up to you to provide about eighty percent of your g tolerance by this straining maneuver. Every muscle in your body should be tense. You should feel like you're hyper-constipated. Your thighs and calves should be tensed. You should be trying to curl your toes out the bottom of your boots. You should be straining with every muscle in your upper body. You should also be aware of your breathing. The worst thing you can do is hold your breath while pulling g. I've seen people who try to do exactly that (not recommended). The medical community tells me you should be taking a breath about every three seconds. I'm not sure this is true for each and every one of us, but it seems fairly close. I breathe at about that rate. Check yourself. It's easy. Just go hot mike during your next engagement and then listen to the tape. What you should hear is a sharp (that is, rapid) intake of breath, about three to five seconds of relative silence while you really bear down with the M-1 /L-1, and then a sharp exhalation followed instantly by the next inhalation to start the next cycle.
Now here's a g-tolerance tip I'll bet you haven't heard about. I saw an article in the 2 June 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated that really started me thinking. The article was about our Olympic luge team and how a dentist had helped them. It seems that he'd made them a mouthpiece to wear during their runs on the luge to improve their ability to pull g during the turns. I figured that if it could help these folks pull three to four g for less than ten seconds, then it should certainly be able to help us pull nine g for a longer period of time. I had the dentist at Edwards AFB make one for me, and I'm convinced it improves my g tolerance by at least one g. This is just my subjective judgment, but I'm sure that the improvement is at least that much.
The kind of mouthpiece I'm describing is a TMJ bite block. It is very important that you make this distinction. It is not the kind of mouthpiece you wear playing football or any other contact sport. It's not there to keep you from chipping your teeth. TMJ is short for temporomandibular joint (jawbone for you ag majors). The principle involved is that all of us have some degree of misalignment as to how our teeth match up. We subconsciously hold our jaw in the proper position so our teeth mesh. This TMJ bite block helps align the jaw properly so we can now relax and not have to use unnecessary muscular strength. It also gives us something to bite on to help strain. The more muscles we can use effectively, the higher we can raise our blood pressure to combat g effects. I know some of you think this is a bunch of BS, but give it a try before you write it off. Go to your dentist on base and tell him you want to be fitted with a TMJ appliance. I'll be surprised if you don't think it makes an improvement in your ability to sustain g. It is not magic. (The bite block is just one more item to add to what you already should be doing.)
Before I end, I want to discuss one more aspect of pulling g. There's some concern that the ability of newer airplanes to pull g in a hurry, or onset rate, (specifically the F-16, but with its new g limiter the F-18 is probably as quick) decreases your ability to pull g. I don't see where this is a player. If you're flying the airplane, it should never be a surprise that there's suddenly a rapid increase in g. If the message goes from your brain to your right hand ("Mongo, pull now!), it should also be able to send a message in parallel to the rest of Mongo - "Here comes a lot of g!" Although these new airplanes are capable of high onset rates, you're the one controlling the onset of the onset. Understand? It should come as no surprise, then, that there'll be a lot of g to contend with shortly after you yank on the stick. You're the one in control. Get ready early. Just because you know that the g limiter will prevent you from an over-g on the airplane does not remove your obligation to prevent an over-g on you.
Attention to detail. You can make it work for you. I'm no superman, but I'll be happy to demonstrate a constant nine g for more than forty-five seconds. Any time you'd like. Because I'm looking for any detail that will help me win ... I'm looking for that unfair advantage.
Check six!
